The Story

SketchBook Mobile is a great smartphone drawing app which has just been reduced in price to £0.10 ($0.10) in celebration of 10 billion downloads from the Android Market. What better time to get creative with this excellent tablet drawing app?

The Experience

In a lot of respects SketchBook Mobile is the drawing app we wanted Adobe Ideas to be. Although this app has the word ‘Mobile’ in its title, it works perfectly on an Android tablet where you can naturally sketch your outlines with a great deal more detail than a smartphone.

Similarly to Adobe Ideas, if you want to create a simple pencil drawing you can do so by modifying the thickness, opacity and colour of your strokes. Unlike Adobe Ideas, SketchBook Mobile includes a broad selection of other brushes, effects and design options.

This range of available options elevates the app to the point where you can create something not at all shabby or just have a huge amount of fun messing about. Importantly, you can layer your drawings on top of each other so, for example, a bold paint brush outline can be shaded in with some swish spray can stylings without ruining the original image.

The one area where SketchBook Mobile does slouch a bit is in its user interface. There are no easy select tools meaning you’ll have enter a menu just to change one aspect of the way you draw. Despite this lack of quick button, the menu system is impeccably intuitive to use with most options available within three touchscreen taps

All in all, SketchBook Mobile may be lacking in polish but all the core ingredients for a sublime drawing app are here and ready to use. Ultimately, that’s all that counts.